The road

heywriters

sadgrrly02

our tasteful callbacks vs their garish references

takineko

Our clever Easter Eggs vs their desperate pandering

2urban2fantasy

Our impactful foreshadowing vs their clumsy Chekhov’s gun

mostly-funnytwittertweets

wellmetmat

animentality

headspace-hotel

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

pureamericanism

Putting on my Ecologist Hat, I once had a friend ask me "how long does it take for an old-growth forest to form? how old is 'old-growth'?" I gave the question a good bit of thought, and I will stand by my answer: for pretty much any temperate forest I'm aware of, after about 100 years after a major disruption (fire, the saw, pest/disease outbreak, volcanic eruption) it will begin to noticeably take on old-growth characteristics*. And after 250 years it will be meaningfully indistinguishable from an undisturbed forest. This is, of course, not including pests and diseases that eliminate an entire species or genus from the ecosystem, or the introduction of new species. But even in those cases, this is about the right timeframe for a new autopoeic old-growth ecosystem to be established.

This is sort of bad news, in that old-growth forests do take a long time to reestablish. But I think it will come as good news to many, who imagine that old-growth forests are necessarily millennia old.

*What are old-growth characteristics? Well, these: trees of a wide variety of ages and size classes forming a complex, multilayered canopy; an abundance of late-successional, shade-tolerant species; a forest floor community featuring herbaceous species adapted to dense forest conditions and a deep organic layer of decomposing leaf litter; animal communities similarly adapted to these conditions; large amounts of dead wood, both standing and on the ground; and the complex forest floor topography associated with repeated uprootings of large trees.

===============

Putting on my Lumberman Hat, once upon a time some coworkers and I found a particularly impressive surviving old-growth redwood on a protected area of a timber company's lands. Now, this tree was impressive by 'surviving a century and a half of intensive logging' standards, but compared to what's out there in the never-logged stands, it was pretty average. We did some quick, back-of-the-envelope geometry to estimate how much recoverable timber would be in that tree, and when we got home we checked out the stumpage prices for old-growth redwood lumber. Conservatively, a sawmill would pay $40,000 for that tree. No, I didn't add a zero there: the wood in that single tree was worth a year's wages for a workingman.

I suddenly became much more sympathetic to the greed of the lumber barons. Yes, they were short-sighted, foolish, and possibly blasphemous in the speed and extent of the destruction they caused. But there have been, and continue to be, people who would sell out things even dearer to them for far, far less money than that.